• oikos + nemo = "manage a household"
• Classical Greece comprised about 1,000 separate communities
• Divide into three major periods/patterns (though each had significant variation)
  • Archaic
  • Classical
  • Hellenistic

• Most people were peasants, ideally living in self-sufficient oikoi, farming a couple of hectares
  • A "normal" household contained not just a nuclear family, but free and unfree dependents, slaves, animals, land, and other property
  • Mixed output of cereals, arid-tolerant ("xerophytic") crops (esp. olives, grapes, figs), and small stock animals (esp. sheep and goats)
• Coastal settlements supported some specialist fishermen
  • Greek waters didn't support sizeable and predictable shals of easily catchable fish
  • As a result, fish was something of a luxury in Greek peasant diets

First of all, get a house, and a woman and an ox // for the plough – a slave woman and not a wife, to follow the // oxen as well – and make everything ready at home, so that you // may not have to ask of another, and he refuses you, and so, // because you are in lack, the season pass by and your work come to // nothing. Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day // after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who // puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who // putts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.

Works and Days, 405-413. c. 700 BC.

• The women in an oikos participated in its economic life, especially among the non-elite
  • If the family could afford it, much of the hard labor was delegated to female slaves oveen by the despoina
• Domestic food production
  • Most milling (turning grains into flour) occurred at home
• Most textiles were produced at home. This involved spinning, weaving into cloth, and turning the cloth into clothes, blankets, and other items
  • Most garments were wool; linen, made from flax, was available by the classical period; silk, imported from China, was available by the time of Alexander the Great

• agorae formed important public spaces in all Greek poleis, facilitating exchange which provided the peasantry with necessary goods they could not produce themselves
• Most foodstuffs had to be produced and consumed locally

• Periodically expelled foreigners (both Greeks and non-Greeks)
• Never produced bronze or silver coinage, maintaining a domestic (non-covertable) "currency" of iron spits
• Had dedicated subservient populations fulfill key economic activities
  • Spartan citizens' only occupation was war, showing a cultural disdain for non-military economic activities
  • helots, enslaved fellow-Greeks, were responsible for agriculture and stock-raising
  • perioikoi, free but subordinate residents, were allowed to practice economic exchange for necessary resources like iron

[Lycurgus] commanded that all gold and sliver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was but very little worth; so that to lay up twenty of thirty pounds there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. … For the iron money could not be carried into the rest of Greece, nor had it any value there, but was rather held in ridicule.

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus (early 2nd century AD), about the semi-mythic Spartan lawgiver

• Athens benefitted from its location as a nexus of trade and political power, and from its domestic production of money
  • Created the first monetized marketplace
  • Most of this activity was concentrated in Piraeus, the port-city, and conducted by non-citizen (and sometime non-Greek) metics and foreigners
  • Both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the society, the foreign element in Athens was larger than in any other Greek polis

Lydian electrum (gold-silver alloy) coin, late 7th - early 6th century BC

Ephesos, Ionia, electrum Hekte or sixth stater, c.625-600 BC. Privately issued by one "Phanes"

• Athens' economic and political power was underwritten by the exploitation of silver mines at Laurion in SE Attica
  • Although mined since the early chalcolithic, new, rich veins were discovered and exploited from the late 6th century BC
  • Mines were almost exclusively worked by chattel-slave labor
• Complex process involved
  1. extraction
  2. smelting, which uses charcoal to extract metal from ore and was carried out on-site. This produced ingots which required
  3. transportation to craftsmen who would then
  4. work the metal (usually requiring more heat) into objects

• Archaeological evidence includes shafts, surface infrastructure, slag heaps, ingots
  • all of which can be extremely difficult to date independently
• Scientific evidence
  • Methodocal geophysical mapping and analysis
  • spectroscopy determines chemical composition, allows for the sources of metal objects to be determined

(Top) 5th century BC; (bottom) 2nd century BC

• Evidence for technology
• Evidence fot the economy
  • Metal composition, weight, and changes over time
  • Sources (mining; re-minting; liquidating treasuries)
  • Exchange rates between different metals fluctuate over time
  • Distribution (location & quantity); trade
• Evidence for ideology
  • Image and text - "Propaganda in the pocket"
  • Contemporary "documents"

• Most economic activities still highly localized. Emergence of regular long-distance flow of goods
  • grain from Etypt to the Aegean
  • cattle and slaves from the Black Sea
  • spices and precious stones from India to the Mediterranean
  • tin from Britain and the northern Balkans and amber from the Baltic
• Limited large-scale "manufacturing"
  • Commercial mills existed from c.600 BC, but became predominant c.200 BC
  • Commercial textile activity: fulling (cleansing wool in urine); production of fine fabrics; production of cheap articles for slaves

• Egypt and Asia Minor were centers for production, consumption, and export of glass (known since pre-dynastic period in Egypt)
  • small vases and bowls produced by casting molten glass with moulds (above, "core-formed" glass alabastron, early Hellenistic)
  • blowing discovered at the end of the Hellenistic period, probably in Syria, which allowed for the mass-production of glass objects

A "lifetime" tetradrachma of Alexander III, Babylon mint, c.325-323 BC. Head of Herakles on obverse, Zeus seated on reverse "*alexandrou basileos"

A posthumus tetradrachma of Alexander III, Mesembria mint, c.100-65 BC. Head of Herakles on obverse, Zeus seated on reverse.

Silver tetradrachma of King Areus I of Lakedaimonia (Sparta), Laconia mint, c.267-265 BC. Head of Herakles on obverse, Zeus seated on reverse "basileos areos"

Overstriking can tell us the relative chronology of coin issues (and thus rulers, states, etc)

4th-3rd century BC silver drachma, Abydos countermark (helmeted bust of Artemis on obverse; eagle with ABY on reverse) on an older issue (bust of Artemis wearing mural crown on obverse, eagle with wings outstretched with ABY on reverse)

• Ruled in the northwest of the Indian subcomtinent from mid-2nd century BC to the early 1st century AD
• Some rulers are recorded in Greek, Roman, and Indian historical sources, but the majority are known only through their coinage
  • 36 known Baktrian and Indo-Greek rulers
  • Exact chronology and sequencing remains obscure, but established through overstrikes but also changes in shape, material, and iconography

Bilingual Silver drachma of Menander "Soter" (c.150-130 BC), Pushkalavati mint. Draped bust on obverse "basileos soteros menandrou" (Greek), Athena on reverse "Maharajasa tratarasa Menamdrasa" (Prakrit)

He spread Greek rule to its greatest extent in India conquering as far as the Ganges. He converted to Buddhism, and is only Indo_Greek king remembered in Indian literary sources